Fragmentation
by pollywantsa
Summary: Sometimes the bad guys win. TV-verse.
1. one

**Fragmentation**

Sometimes the bad guys win._  
_

_Thunderbirds TV-verse, slight crossover with (the original 1967 adventures of) Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons. _

_Disclaimer: I don't any of them and I probably shouldn't be playing with them._

* * *

1.

Virgil lay where he had fallen, sprawled untidily across his bed. A shaft of orange light pierced a gap in the curtain, signalling another day gone already, another day lost. He watched the beam track its way slowly across the room, illuminating the faded blue of the carpet and turning it an ugly brown. He shifted his eyes upwards, studied the ceiling rose. In another life he might have drawn it, spent hours getting the light and shadow just right. But he'd had to give that up, the drawing, because everything kept coming out jagged and black. He closed his eyes and drowsed for a time, poised upon the edge of dream. Virgil dreamed poetry now, in amongst the shades of things that once were.

When he woke he found the burning afternoon sun replaced by the cool buzz of pink neon ghosting through the room. He lay in the flickering dark, listened to the sounds of traffic on the street below, lifted his arm and looked at his wristwatch. A plain silver watch that told only the time. He dragged himself from the bed, undressed and showered, lit a cigarette and stared at himself under the hard fluorescent light. What did he look like now? So difficult to judge in the flat surface of the mirror. He turned his face to the right and then back again. His hair was longer now, unruly, because he wanted to hide himself behind it. He wanted to be the chain-smoking lounge pianist, playing for money in the evenings and letting women comb their fingers through his curling hair. His mouth twisted. He'd had more women in his life as vagrant pianist than he'd ever had as rich playboy.

He drew on the cigarette and watched in the mirror as he exhaled. He tried hard not to think about it, but the past was like sticky tar that kept drawing him down. He'd spent all his life in that past, struggling with the early mornings and regulation haircuts. Forever building and working and thinking. But Virgil had always preferred the nights and cigarettes for breakfast. He wasn't like his brothers, who were born for sunshine and regiment. Astronauts and pilots and aquanauts, they were made for action, for giving and taking orders. Virgil was made for turpentine and places where time didn't matter. And so he finally had the life he always thought he was made for, and he had the women and the cigarettes, but he wanted that other life back. His brothers, the sun, the endless blue sea.

He closed his eyes, there in front of the mirror, and thought about his sunshine brothers, thought about that last sun-bright day on the island. On the back of his eyelids he could see Three lifting heavenwards, a trail of flame piercing the blinding blue sky. Alan and Gordon were on board, sent to collect John so that Gaat might have them all together. But none of them had returned. Gaat had smiled at that, another part of his perfect plan falling into perfect place.

Virgil dropped the cigarette into the sink. Returning to the bedroom he opened a drawer and removed a small box of cash. He counted the bills and returned the box to the drawer. He'd never had an intimate relationship with money before, never had to count it and save it for the things he needed. But he managed, and a few months after it had all fallen apart he saved enough to hire a plane and return to the island. He hadn't known what would happen, how Gaat might react. If this was yet another part of the grand plan and Virgil was sliding right into it, the predictable Virgil peg fitting neatly into the Virgil hole. It was so hard to fight against somebody who was inside your head, somebody who knew exactly what you were thinking and what you were going to do. Virgil wondered, not for the first time, how his father and Kyrano had so badly underestimated Gaat for so long, how badly they had failed to see how near the danger had become.

But despite the fear that had coiled slick in his stomach, a great serpent of quicksilver filling him up and twisting around and around in its struggle to break free, Virgil had gone to the island anyway. And in the end nothing had happened. He'd been allowed to land, escorted to the villa and permitted to spend the day with his father. And at the end of that day he'd been allowed to leave again, unmolested.

So Virgil worked harder, smiled at more women, collected more money and returned to the island whenever he could. His father had changed, an undistinguished beard concealing his expressive mouth. He'd taken to roaming the island in tattered shorts, his hard body weathered and tanned by the relentless tropical sky. His father was a wild thing now, reshaped by the endless torments of his captor. But he still smiled, still embraced his son, still had hope that an end would come to all this, somehow. But Virgil didn't know how, couldn't see his way past the mire and the complexity and the constant need for secrecy and more secrecy. And his father himself, insisting that he could fix this. That if he couldn't Scott would. Scott, his first born, his Superman. He could stop the earth spinning and send them all back to a better time couldn't he, back to before all of this. But Virgil knew things his father didn't know. Scott had gone to fight another war and this island, and the shining glory of International Rescue, was sinking into myth and legend.

Virgil would watch his father's profile as he searched the endless horizon for a sign of something. Anything. Hope, probably, was floating out there somewhere. Jeff would ask if Virgil had seen his brothers, and Virgil would say 'Only Alan, Dad.' Virgil would talk about Alan's racing and his recklessness, the buzz cut, the golden hair all gone. He would say how Alan didn't look like his baby brother any more, he looked harder and more like their father than Virgil had ever thought possible. His father would sigh and ask again if he'd seen Scott. 'Not since that time I told you,' Virgil would say. Then his father would look at him, really look at him. 'Why don't you get a haircut son?' he would ask, and Virgil would look at his father's face. 'Why don't you?' And they'd snort at the ridiculousness of it, that after all those years of trimming and pomading and unholy neatness they'd end up like this, on the beach.

* * *

Virgil chose a dark shirt and pants and put them on. He wore his clothes tight now, closer to his skin, because it made him feel safe, made him feel in control. He looked good despite the unruly hair and unshaven face, and women, and occasionally men, told him so. But Virgil dressed for work not play, and kept his colours muted. He was no Cass Carnaby after all, he was just a simple pianist playing in dark bars, dallying with enough waitresses that he was spoiled for hot dinners. But Virgil preferred the hard burn of scotch to food. He found it dulled the memories that forever threatened to overwhelm him.

He remembered his third visit to the island, when Gaat had insisted he stay for dinner. Virgil was permitted to use his old room to dress, since dinner was a formal affair and Virgil must look nice for the occasion. He had stood in his room, naked and dripping from the shower, and breathed the old smells of paint, and of him. He fingered his possessions – the paintbrushes, the aftershave, the television remote control. He looked at the made bed, the open wardrobe. His clothes, too large for him now, had waited patiently all this time, hanging in nice neat rows. He smoothed his old suede vest, the one his brothers hated, selected a white shirt and dark trousers and raked a trembling hand through his hair.

Dinner was in the formal dining room, the one the family had never used. The windows were open to the sea and the setting sun, and Gaat was resplendent in embroidered gold and manicured fingernails as he postured at the head of the table. Jeff appeared in tattered shorts and shirt, jostled along by one of Gaat's men. Virgil wondered what life was like when he wasn't there. Images came to him, all the horrors that his uncontrolled imagination had presented in the months after he was forced to leave his father behind, random nightmares from the jukebox in his head. Jeff met Virgil's eyes over the stark white tablecloth. Had his father always had those scars? Virgil looked away, at the open sea, the orange sky.

The conversation was stilted and driven by Gaat, who was frightening in his magnanimity. Kyrano, bent and aged, silently delivered dish after dish. Traditional Malaysian fare, satay and rendang and nasi lemak. Things Kyrano had cooked years and years ago, when he was new to his American family and their apple pie and ice-cream.

'So,' Gaat had asked, 'how is life back in your country? How are your brothers? Why do they not come to see their father?'

Virgil stared at the table, unwilling to step over the line that had just been drawn. 'My brothers are all well,' he answered finally, not looking at Gaat's face. But the line had been crossed anyway. 'Liar,' said Gaat, and Virgil felt pressure building in his head. 'You never see your brothers at all. They don't seek you out. They don't care about their father. And they don't care about you.'

Virgil had flown home in the dark after that, with a headache that wasn't from the wine.

* * *

Around midnight, as Virgil perched on a stool and smiled at a dark-haired woman who was maybe old enough to be his type, an unexpected shadow fell upon him. 'Excuse me,' the shadow said, 'Virgil Tracy?' Virgil blinked in surprise, half drunk already and not quite sure why the earth had suddenly threatened to tilt. 'Could you come with me?' the shadow said, gloved hand on Virgil's shoulder. 'Um,' said Virgil, blinking at the blue uniform. Not Scott. Scott doesn't wear blue anymore.

The officer led him through the night, across the silent and empty street. He was tall, taller than Virgil, straight and narrow with yellow blond hair. 'I'm Captain Blue,' he said, his long boots tapping on the pavement. 'Your brother is in the car.'

Virgil slowed, not sure again, suddenly uncertain. Captain Blue sensed the hesitation and turned, studying Virgil as they stopped beneath a street light. Virgil looked into his face and was startled by bright eyes and an unexpected gentleness. Virgil had to try hard to imagine this man fighting, killing. But there, he could see it, the blood behind the steel blue eyes. Virgil thought back to when Scott had joined Spectrum and had come to him wearing a crisp new uniform and hiding nothing behind his eyes. It was right, Virgil had realised that day, what Scott had done, though Virgil hadn't wanted it. He had wanted Scott to stay with him and fight their battle, not somebody else's. But Scott needed a uniform. And Scott needed a purpose.

A car door opened and closed and Scott was there, all dark green Kevlar and tight black wool. Scott had been broken, Virgil realised with sudden and blinding clarity, and Spectrum had repaired him and painted him the wrong colour, the colour of deep water on a treacherous day. And they had given him a different name, Captain Viridian, as rules and regulations required. So Virgil followed rules and regulations and said it plainly as he looked straight into Scott's eyes. 'Captain Viridian.'

'Virgil,' Scott replied, hard and crisp and as brittle as Virgil's breaking heart, and Captain Blue had the grace to look uncomfortable if Scott didn't. Virgil waited, studying the familiar lines of his brother's face, the square cut of Scott's jaw as it set firmly against him. He wondered what this Scott thought of him, if this viridian Scott loathed his lack of focus and discipline, if he disdained Virgil's uncut hair. And Scott looked back at him, dark eyes sternly roaming Virgil's open face, looking for something maybe, something he had hoped to find and couldn't. And then he spoke, this cool Captain Viridian.

'When are you going to the island next?'

Virgil was too drunk for this, he realised. Or not drunk enough. 'I don't know. I don't have enough money right now.'

Scott nodded. He withdrew a package from his vest and handed it to Virgil. 'I need you to go.' His eyes darted briefly to Captain Blue and then back to Virgil. 'I need you to give Father a message. It's in the envelope.'

Virgil slid his fingers over the crisp bundle, measured the weight of its contents as they stood in silence beneath the hard yellow light, surrounded by the flicker and pulse of moths dying. Virgil felt like he too was dying, his fluttering heart impaled upon Scott's stony gaze. He floundered in the moment, one more piece of him breaking away.

Without another word Scott turned and strode back to the red Spectrum vehicle. 'I've seen John,' Virgil called suddenly to the retreating figure. Scott paused for a moment at that, the muscles of his face tightening before he took his seat in the car.

Virgil stood on the street a long time after they had gone, thinking. Thinking he didn't want to go to the island anymore. He could no longer face Gaat's sly innuendos and the palpable threat that one day Gaat would never let him leave. Last time, when he'd tried to leave, he'd been escorted back to the villa. Once more Gaat waited in the sterile dining room. Once more the steaming dishes were arrayed on the great white table. Gaat poured wine and Virgil drank it all, glass after glass after glass, recklessly taunting his host with his vulnerability.

'Look at me,' Gaat said, seeing the redness in Virgil's cheeks, sensing the fly poised to land upon the web. But Virgil didn't look. He remembered a day when Brains, pale and trembling, had turned from his torturer and whispered 'Don't ever look at his eyes.' And Virgil never forgot, never focussed on the black terror no matter how tempted, or how drunk, he became. So he didn't look at Gaat's eyes, though Gaat asked him again and poured him more wine, and came to sit beside him and whispered so his father couldn't hear.

He'd spent that night on the island, in his old room, alone in his bed with his memories and the palm trees outside the window, calling to him. And the next morning on the runway Gaat had stormed down and bellowed at Virgil as they stood sweating in the blistering sun. 'One day I won't let you leave,' he ranted, frightening with his wrath and his menace. 'You'll stay here, on my island, another toy to amuse. You'll come when I call and do the things that I tell you to do!'

Virgil swallowed the fear, wondering if at last the moment had come. He closed his eyes and softly asked 'Why? Why do this? To your family? To mine? Tell me why.' Gaat paused, the palpable force that was his alone receding back into his body. Virgil felt the pressure in his skull diminish and he opened his eyes again, stared at the warping tarmac.

'Because,' said Gaat, gently, as if explaining something simple to a tiny child. 'A long time ago your father took something from me. And my brother should have been there for me when I needed him. Not there for Jefferson Tracy.' Gaat broke off for a moment, damped down the rising anger and hatred. Commenced patiently again. 'For an endless number of years the two of them have taunted me with everything they had and everything they were and I needed to wound them and take it for myself. I wanted it back, what I had lost, and I wanted to see them as I had once been. Broken and bereft of all hope.'

Heat shimmered off the bitumen and the dank odour of kelp blew in from the sea. Gaat stepped closer, lowered his voice, whispered to Virgil like a lover. 'It wasn't as difficult as I thought it would be, the breaking, and now I am bored with them.' He studied Virgil, scrutinising the downturned face, inhaling the damp scent of his body. Virgil closed his eyes again, wilting beneath the burning sun and the humiliating onslaught of Gaat's eyes. 'I can't help wondering if the sons aren't made of sterner stuff than the father.' Gaat stepped back and gestured for Virgil to enter the plane. 'One day I will find out.'

Virgil clambered into the aircraft, his shirt wet against his back. Gaat's deep laugh boomed inside his head as the engines roared to life. 'Don't you want it all back? All the things you have lost?'

Never, Virgil thought, never.

* * *

Virgil lay on his bed, pulled the package from his pocket and opened it. It was full of cash, clean new bills, neatly bound together. More than enough for what he had been asked to do. He imagined that Scott was paid very well as part of the World Security Forces and he'd take the money, thank you very much. A smaller envelope, unmarked, fell from the bundle, and Virgil held it in his hand for a long time, studying it, smelling it, thinking about what might be in it. He wanted to open it, to know what Scott would write to his father, strangely jealous that Scott had never written to him. That Scott could only spare Virgil a few cold hard sentences before leaving him alone in the dark. He lit a cigarette and put the letter beneath his pillow. Maybe during the night the contents would bleed through the paper and he might have new dreams. Better ones.

Once Jeff had pressed a crumpled piece of paper into Virgil's hands. 'Son, can you take this to your grandmother?'

'Sure Dad,' he'd replied, 'As soon as I get a chance.' But he hadn't gotten a chance for weeks, and he'd had to catch a Greyhound bus and then hitchhike right out to the edge of town. He'd walked the long dusty drive to the house and knocked on the faded door, not seeing the dry fields, the peeling paintwork of the window frames. The door had opened and, surprise, his brother was standing there, a resurrected and sun-bleached Jesus. John smiled and stepped back to let him in, as if Virgil had only stopped by to sell a vacuum cleaner. No display of affection for the long lost disciple.

Virgil hugged his grandmother, gave her the letter, then sat on the same sofa he had sat on as a teenager, back when he had lived in this house. John moved crockery in the kitchen as their grandmother assailed Virgil with the standard questions. 'But why doesn't Jeff call me? Why don't you visit more often? I don't understand what's happened…' Virgil stared at his hands. How could he tell her any of it when even the smallest portion would break her heart.

'Read the note, Grandma.' She obliged, unfolding the grubby page with stiff fingers while he watched. She was getting older every visit, falling helplessly in upon herself right before his eyes. She looked at the note, looked at Virgil. 'But darling,' she said, dropping her hands to show him the empty page. 'There's nothing on it.' Tears welled in her eyes and he scooted forward to snatch the paper from her, to hold her hands tightly in his own. 'That's 'coz there are no words, Grandma, no words. He loves you and he's thinking of you and he wants you to know that.' He looked at John, a ghost caught in the doorway. And he cursed his father in his madness, for sending an empty piece of paper to his mother.

Outside, Virgil asked John where he had been for nearly two whole years, but John didn't answer, just stared at the dry and empty fields as if he'd never seen them before, or never thought he'd see them again. Virgil tried again. 'After you ditched Three, where did you all go?' John's expression glazed as he focussed on the far horizon. Virgil sighed inwardly and gave up. He leant back against the fence and closed his eyes, turned his face to catch the sun.

'It was unbelievable, you know. Them coming to get me.'

Virgil didn't reply. He was replaying that time on the back of his eyelids. John trapped on Five, communication and systems cut for days and days until Gaat decided to bring him home.

'I thought I was going to die up there,' John continued, his voice very quiet. And this time Virgil did open his eyes and look at his brother, the bleached profile burning another hole into his memory. 'Without the systems it was so quiet. So dark. There was only me up there. Just me, breathing, and the oxygen getting low.' He paused for a moment, thinking, maybe, about the darkness and the silence and the black void that had tried to swallow him alive.

'When they finally arrived we argued. We fought. Gordon split my lip, son of a bitch.' John laughed at that, touching the scar with his thumb, remembering the insult. 'I wanted to come home, I wanted to see that bastard's blood on my hands. But they wouldn't have it. I didn't know, they said, I didn't understand, I hadn't been there. They told me all we could do was ditch Three and run away. Can you believe it?' He turned to Virgil, because plainly he still could not. 'They wanted to run away.'

Virgil remembered that moment like he was there, because he'd watched the grainy footage over and over in the days after he'd been taken from the island, after he'd been abandoned by a wet canefield outside Suva and had to walk the long humid miles into town. On a small and stuttering television he'd watched the great rocket settle gently on yellow sand before toppling slowly into the green surf. His brothers had emerged, clambering one by one along pitted orange metal and dropping into the water. Silent and grim and matter of fact, as though they did this every day. They'd waded ashore, discarding their hats and sashes in the waves as they strode into darkness and infamy.

'There isn't much room for fighting on the control deck, you know.' John turned back to the horizon with a wry smile 'Gordon pinned me down while Alan aimed us at Australia. Twisted my arm so far up my back I heard the joints pop.' He leant towards Virgil conspiratorially. 'That kid learnt more in WASP than he ever let on.'

They were quiet for a moment as they listened to the cicadas screaming. Sometimes Virgil wanted to scream like that. Sometimes, when he was asleep, maybe he did.

'I couldn't forgive them.' There was pain and disappointment in John's blue eyes.

Simple as that. They'd let him down and he'd walked away. Virgil rubbed his face, thought about shaving and all the reasons why he wouldn't, then said, 'Did you know that Three is still on that beach? Tourist attraction.'

John laughed.

* * *

An insistent knock roused Virgil from his bed. He staggered through the apartment, eyes gummed with sleep, and opened the door. Captain Viridian stood on the landing, Spectrum insignia on his uniform and anger on his face. He strode past Virgil into the sparse apartment, scrutinising the room with every measured step. Then he turned to Virgil and exploded.

'I asked you to go the island. I gave you money. Why are you still here, a week later?'

Virgil wasn't ready for this. He wasn't awake yet, wasn't ready for sensory input, and Scott of all people should know that. He rubbed his eyes wearily and looked around the room for his cigarettes, anything to distract him from Scott and his anger. He shook one from the pack then proffered it to Scott.

'No thank you.' Scott could barely contain his irritation. 'I don't smoke.'

Virgil raised an eyebrow as he bent into the lighter. 'That's new. And here I thought you'd end up sucking cheroots like dear old Dad.'

Scott's eyes sparked for an instant, but the fire was quickly smothered. 'I asked you to give Father a message.'

'And I will.' Virgil's temper was beginning to rouse. 'But I have things to do. A job. I can't just up and go any time I want.'

Scott glared at him. 'You need to go now. I need you to go now. This week. And give him the message.'

'The message. What's in that message, by the way? How much you love him? How much you miss him? How sorry you are that you abandoned him?' Virgil stepped closer. 'I'm the only one who visits him you know. The only one. Me. The rest of you abandoned him...' He broke off in something like pain, something like disgust. Something like hatred. He stared into Scott's cold blue eyes but could find nothing except his own pale face reflected there. 'You abandoned him.' Virgil's voice faltered. 'You abandoned me.'

Silence then as the rift stretched further between them, a great gaping chasm that they could no longer find their way across. Scott reached into his vest and withdrew a bulging notebook. He methodically opened the pages, strewing paper all over the small table. Maps and notes and photographs. Surveillance photographs. Of his brothers.

'I abandoned you? I abandoned none of you!' Scott was angry now, his voice rising as he rifled through the photographs. 'Here. You've seen John? I've seen John too.' He thrust a photo at Virgil's face. 'Cairo. Translating.' He threw the image down, thrust another one forward. 'Alan? Here's Alan at Daytona, Alan at Parola. No surprises there.' Another photo was thrust at Virgil. 'Gordon? Never left Australia, running dive tours. And you!' He rummaged amongst the pile on the table. 'Here's Virgil on Friday nights, on Saturday nights. Here's Virgil so drunk that women fight about who will take him home. Here's Virgil,' he said, 'right in front of me and…' He stopped abruptly, gathered the photos together and placed the bundle back inside his vest. He rubbed his face and sighed, and for the briefest instant the old Scott, Virgil's Scott, was there, in Virgil's living room. 'Jesus Virg, we got as far away from each other as we could get, but I never lost any of you. I knew right where to look.' Their eyes met. 'Because I'm your brother.'

Virgil stared at Scott, letting the implications settle into his consciousness. More than anything he wanted to go to his brother and touch him, embrace the hard reality of him, inhale the familiar scent of him. But instead he let the long crushing months of loneliness and anger and bitterness swell until he could no longer contain it inside himself. Like a volcano that had lain dormant and ignored for far too long, Virgil finally erupted.

'So all this time, all this time, you knew where everybody was and you left us all alone and miserable? Even worse, you've been watching me? Following me around town? You've been in town this past week, waiting for me to charter a plane, making sure I did what you asked, and you never once spoke to me?' Virgil's voice fragmented into shards as his anger collapsed in on itself. 'What are you that you could do that?'

'Whatever else I am, I'm still your brother.' But it was Captain Viridian who said that. Cool Captain Viridian pretending to be his brother, pretending not to hear the splintering anguish in Virgil's voice. 'Do your brother a favour and take our father a message.'

* * *

Virgil taxied the plane to the base of the cliff and stepped out onto the runway. He stared at the jagged rock wall towering above him, knowing that behind it and three feet of tempered steel lay his greatest masterpiece, and that in all probability he would never see her again. He lifted his head and looked up at the observation deck, saw Gaat perched there, a black vulture framed against the blue sky, peering down at him. One of Gaat's guards approached and Virgil raised his arms, permitting the search but never taking his eyes off the vulture.

He made his way down to the sea, fighting through the jungle that had overtaken the track and found his father there, on the rocks. 'I saw the plane,' Jeff said as he stood to greet him. 'How are you son?'

'I'm good, good. Still surviving. How are you, Dad?'

'Still surviving.' Jeff's faded blue eyes twinkled.

They talked until the sun set, watched as a great mass of cumulus mushroomed over the sea, piling itself high into the fading sky as it tracked its way towards them. Virgil saw lightning on the purpling horizon and knew he'd be going nowhere tonight. He could feel Gaat crouched somewhere in the oncoming darkness, a great black shadow pressing against his back, waiting for him, setting the trap. He felt the serpent coil in his stomach, flickering and twisting, cold fear made tangible so that he had to swallow hard and tighten his throat against it. He trembled suddenly, once, stopped before his father could see. Turning in the twilight he pushed the crumpled envelope into Jeff's calloused fingers. "Scott sent you a message.'

'What did he say?' asked Jeff, eyes wide as he turned the envelope over and over in his hands, carefully smoothing the creases, too afraid to open it now that it was finally here. Virgil could feel the tremor threaten to overtake him again and he tensed his body against it, looked up at the rushing sky.

'A storm's coming, Dad.'

* * *


	2. two

2.

John waited in the monorail terminal, watching the digital display overhead blink out a steady stream of seconds. 17:05:05. 17:05:06. Blink.

Albert Einstein was obsessed with time, but then old Albert hadn't drifted cold and alone in space, knowing his time was bleeding out. During those weeks of silence and dark John had become the sand in the hourglass, spiralling helplessly down in a vortex of fear and despair. And one day as he lay on the cold floor of Five, eyes wide as the Earth shone stark and distant and inaccessible above him, Time became a living entity. It came to take its measure of John, icy fingers caressing his undefended flesh, goosebumps rising in waves upon his skin. And now it came snapping at his shirt-tails as he ran from city to city, trying to outrun Time.

A news program flickered on the screen above, the remote voice of the anchor faint above the clatter of feet upon ceramic tile. Rain had swept away a village in the Philippines, mud-stained misery relayed across an indifferent world in two flat and meaningless dimensions. John watched impassively, the memory of mud rising in his mind, pungent as a freshly turned grave. He remembered how it tasted on his tongue, how it worked its way over his ankles and into his boots, seeping coldly through his clothes the way it seeped through people's lungs. He inhaled, a long drawing in of breath, and looked away, knowing what was coming next. 'Where are they?' was the worn-out cry, as the world looked for evidence of something that shouldn't have existed, something that no longer did. Over and over they searched for International Rescue, tried to solve the mystery of something that had become, in the twenty-first century, even more compelling than the pyramids. Let it die, John thought, because we all have.

He blinked beneath the hard fluorescent lights, watched the streaming parade of travelers dragging their bags behind them as if they were wayward dogs. He studied them vacantly, wondered what the hell he was doing. He hadn't seen the world yet, hadn't scuffed his feet across every dirty surface of the planet that had taunted him for so long. John clamped his teeth together, ran his tongue along the smooth backs of them. He was angry at himself for letting Scott take advantage of the old behaviour patterns. The years of conditioning that made him jump when Scott barked, Pavlov's dog telling Schrödinger's cat what to do. He was angry because Scott had found him in Cairo. Because Scott had come to him in that uniform. Because Scott had asked him to go home and because he'd stupidly said yes.

John stood wearily and hefted his bag over his shoulder. Scott had given him plenty of cash. Danger money he'd called it, and he'd smiled a small smile as he shoved it roughly into John's unwilling fingers. John had eyed his brother, taking in the green uniform, the fine lines around Scott's shaded eyes, and gestured to the pistol at Scott's side.

'Have you used that?'

Scott's hands fell, wounded, through the empty air. 'Yes. I have.'

'To kill a man?'

Scott's eyes lifted to meet John's. Identical shades of blue, matter and antimatter colliding and cancelling each other out. 'Yes.'

John smiled sickly. 'My brother, the killer.'

Scott inhaled, exhaled, said quietly, 'I've always known how to kill a man, John.'

'Yet for some reason you couldn't kill _him_.'

Scott looked away, blasted. Hollowed out by Time. 'I'm not here to argue with you.'

'Why didn't you kill him when you had the chance?'

'Because I _never_ had the chance!'

Silence then, and the ice blue glare of John, running Scott through.

'John, there was no chance. You don't know, you weren't there –'

'Don't,' said John, because he had heard it all before, didn't want to hear it all again. Knew in his empty heart that what Scott said was true. They never had a chance.

* * *

The monorail slid out of the station, smooth and slick on a gleaming rail that stretched endlessly across the horizon, an unbroken road to nowhere. John slumped in his seat and stared out at the colourless sky, the shadows flowing smooth as black water across the cooling desert sands. He watched the night rise in ripples that lapped soft against the carriage, midnight fingers tapping against the window, trying to find a way to consume the light inside. John chewed his lip, his reflection bouncing bright off the plexiglass, a thousand shadowy wings fluttering restless behind his eyes. Night had come quickly, the way it does when you are close to the equator and darkness falls suddenly on you. Staring into the endless dark he remembered the moment when night had dropped unexpectedly, and crushed the life out of him.

Looking down from the wide window of Five, John had watched Earth turn in the night twenty thousand miles below him, a mysterious blue jewel suspended tantalisingly out of his reach. Only the clamour of the radio betrayed her serenity, the speaker array discharging endless bursts of turmoil. Terror and death that stole away the Earth's glitter and tarnished the azure treasure. Sometimes John closed his eyes to the shining planet below and let himself fill with the despair that rolled unceasingly across her. In those moments he would wonder at his father's dream, that a handful of men could save a world that was wilfully self-destructing. Then he would open his eyes and catch his breath at the beauty that glimmered before him and he would understand. He would reach out and catch the Earth in the cup of his hand and keep her there, safe in his grasp.

But now John could only watch, mute and uneasy, as tropical cyclone Ena spun her way south across the Pacific, a swirling fractal of updraft and downdraft that reflected bright in his placid unblinking eyes. A great blind eye of destruction that curled her way across scattered island nations, she had cleared Tracy Island two days earlier, her periphery spinning out into fingers of instability that John knew would bring humid sunshine one moment and hard grey downpours the next. Yet the island, a fortress of rock and steel primed to endure any assault, remained ominously silent, the open channel to home relaying bursts of random and disturbing static. John turned away from the unseeing eye of Ena and returned to the communications board, the electric pulse of Five thrumming soft beneath his unquiet fingers.

Two days of silence from Base. Two black days in which foreboding had swollen inside him like a live thing, pounding hard at the lining of his skull as it struggled to be set free. He stared unseeing at the equipment that ranged across the crowded inner wall, the chatter from the speakers filling the air with noise. But the only sound that John could hear was the steady hiss of static from the island, and the soft warning chime that told him no signal had been found.

No signal found. The unfamiliar tang of fear rolled like mercury across John's tongue.

He reached across the board to run another scan, recoiled abruptly as rows of code streamed chaotically across the screens. With no other warning the console lapsed into silence, the babble of voices fading in the still air, the monitors before his disbelieving eyes sputtering and dying as the satellite quietly powered down and blinked itself off.

John froze in the sudden dark, the reassuring hum of generators replaced by the rhythmic pounding of blood in his ears. Raising his watch to his face he peered at the glowing green display. 18:12:49. 18:12:50. 18:12:51. Thunderbird Five, shackled in geosynchronous orbit, was passing the terminator into night.

John had never been afraid of the dark, but he was afraid of how dark it was going to become.

* * *

The monorail terminated at the port of Dakar, where John found passage on a container ship across the dull grey Atlantic to New York, four days of chop and swell and a hard wind to whip at his shirt and fill his ears with sound**. **In the leaden still of dawn he walked upon the splintered deck, the taste of salt on his lips and the stars falling away endlessly to the west. Caught high in the echoing depths of space John hadn't watched the stars. Had glared instead at the round face of the Earth, her cold blue light burning holes into his retinas as she hurtled him across the solar system at a thousand plummeting miles an hour.

John's attempts to access the satellite's dead systems spilled untidily from the console in a fountain of tangled wire and relays that lapped against his toes, flowed like coloured water across his cold and listless hands. The Pacific beyond the window was calm and cloud-free, but John knew from experience what destruction the wind and tide-swollen ocean could wreak. Could see in the crystal of his mind's eye the shattering of Tracy Island. The crushing weight of certainty smashed down upon him and he slumped against the dismembered panel, ground his teeth together to stop himself from screaming. Jeff Tracy had spawned five sons, the reflexive urge of an only child to provide siblings where he had none. And when Jeff had brandished his great ambition his sons had gladly disengaged their lives, tucked their proclivities firmly into their trousers. The Tracy DNA, so clean and fine and strong, had failed to replicate. Had come to an abrupt end beneath the unseeing and indifferent eye of a cyclone. All that remained to John now was the endless cycle of Time, the rising of the sun and the moon and the far away Earth. His days measured in heartbeats as the life seeped out of him in the incremental ticks of the timepiece that suckled at his wrist**.**

Time whispered like a phantom in the narrow corridors, swirled in eddies in the thinning air, solidified into bony fingers that pressed their way cruelly into John's shivering flesh. With every caress he was surrendering, his muscles loosening beneath his skin, the isolation playing havoc with his mind. The black space before his eyes took unexpected shape, pale phantoms coalescing out of dark water, his ears filling with static through which filtered sudden bursts of sound. He heard his father laughing, the sharp strike of a match, the gasping mayday of desperate men, dying. A piano played as he tread the midnight corridors, a blind man stepping through a field of razor blades, and somewhere far away waves crashed soft on a sandy shore. In the ice-rimed cocoon of his bed he sank into the soft bosom of his grandmother, she who gathered him up when he fell, and who stroked the silken flax of his hair. When he opened his eyes it was to the silent momentum of an endless descent, his bones shifting and settling, his blood changing direction like a dark tide following the pull of the moon. John's breath ghosted cold from his mouth and crystals bloomed like flowering vines along the metal edges of the window. In the soundless dark he splayed his fingers against the wall and let the ice creep unchecked across his skin.

Five had once been a haven for John. A gentle womb into which he curled languidly, an amoeba safe inside a symbiotic host. She had filled his lungs with air, filtered clear water into his coffee and kept his bed warm at night. Her energy had sparked beneath his delicate fingers, her heart pulsed steady beneath the soles of his feet. Now she was silent, cold and unresponsive to his caress. She shunned his advances, ignored his pleading eyes. She had betrayed him utterly, the pale parasite inside her, and waited for him to die.

* * *

John hunched over the rail of the carrier in the raw afternoon light, salt spray cool upon his face, the ocean foaming white across the lurching bow, every grim-crested surge bringing him closer to home, closer to the reality he had been running from. He turned his face to the wind and inhaled the odour of the dark and roiling ocean, swallowed hard against the violent clenching of his throat. He gripped the rail tightly, the metal frigid beneath his blanching fingers.

The salt across his tongue brought memories of Gordon, of sunshine days when Gordon would take John down to the sand and stretch him out like a platinum starfish so the light could burn its way into his starving limbs. Gordon, whose skin purled with the essence of the deep green sea, and who reflected the endless island summer in the amber mirrors of his eyes.

It was Gordon who had come to John on Five, exhaled upon John the forgotten scent of the warm island wind. It was Gordon who had broken open John's cocoon and brought him, blinking, back from the edge of the void. He had taken John's cold white hands in his own and let the warmth of the golden sun that burned hot inside him flow through his fingertips and into John's heart.

'Gordon,' said John, voice splintering in the frigid air, tears rising in the blind night of his eyes. 'You're alive.'

Silence. And then, out of the dark, 'John. We're not going back.'

* * *

Since he'd fallen from the sky John had stayed in constant motion, turned his face towards the endlessly moving sun as it slipped below the broad curve of the Earth. It was the coming of night that he dreaded, the empty silence in which creatures that dripped black blood crowded incessantly across his dreamscape. John closed his eyes to the roll of the carrier over the waves, his equilibrium shifting as he rode another kind of wave, one that tumbled his world down and smashed it onto jagged rocks. Time hadn't erased the nightmare and he still reacted with the same nauseating urgency. Helpless, he felt his stomach heave and throw its contents to the wind. He sagged in defeat, fingers clutched tight to the rail, understanding too late that the midnight wings had beaten against the inside of Gordon that day. The day the golden sun inside his brother had faltered and gone out.

'Gordon…'

John stepped hesitantly into Thunderbird Three's control room, uncertainty passing like a cloud across the pale landscape of his face. The interior light of Three stabbed painfully across his vision, illuminated the bruises black beneath Gordon's startling topaz eyes.

'Gordon…'

Gordon prepared the ship for undocking, his movements cold and precise as though he were made of burnished metal. As though there were no blood moving in the fine veins that pulsed beneath the surface of his skin. John's eyes slid towards Alan, hunched tightly over the navigation console, golden curls twisted and uncombed and lifeless on his head. He stared, dumbfounded, at the coordinates Alan was keying in.

From somewhere far away John felt the dull thump of the airlock sealing, felt the subtle tilt of the floor beneath his feet as the rockets roared to life, felt a cold hand whisper across the nape of his neck as the universe stilled to a single moment of Time. The powerful engines of Three drummed through his body, a disquieting throb as he lunged towards the keyboard and Alan's traitorous fingers, determined to take control of the trajectory as Three fell towards the rushing Earth.

Gordon moved calmly across John's path, something dark and foreign rising behind his eyes, something that eclipsed the light inside and lashed out with unexpected violence. Gordon's fist impacted abruptly with John's face and he staggered back, blood blooming hot across his chin. He pressed his lips to his sleeve, blood spreading like a spill of black ink across the blue fabric.

'Alan,' said John measuredly, caught in the cut-glass prisms of Gordon's eyes, 'I don't know what the hell is going on, but I want you to change the coordinates. Now.'

Alan's hands curled like pale butterflies and fell, wilted lifeless on the keyboard. He lifted his eyes and John saw the same unnamed darkness resting there. 'You don't understand, John. We're not going back.'

Gordon moved again, a blur of blue and orange that impacted John like stone, rammed him against the sharp edge of a control panel. Gordon's body was rigid, muscles tight beneath his skin, face calm as he twisted John savagely down to the hard metal of the deck. John thudded to the floor, the air crushing from his lungs, face scraped stinging across steel as his brother brought a hard knee to rest on his back. He struggled against the pressing weight and Gordon responded harshly, the wrenching of John's shoulder bringing a curtain of pain down before his eyes. Salt water pricked beneath his eyelids as another rush of blood filled his mouth and spilled like hot metal from his lips.

'Gordon,' he ground out, spine crackling beneath the unyielding body of his brother, static rising in a white roar inside his head. 'Don't.'

But Gordon remained unmoving as Three continued her fall to Earth on a dying fountain of flame. Gravity seeped through the walls of the cabin, pinned John helpless beneath the oppressive weight of atmosphere, squeezed an iron fist around the beating of his defeated heart. The static inside his head ebbed like a morning tide, leaving an empty space inside him through which nothing could be heard except his own breathing, hard and laboured as the air struggled past the blood in his mouth and the weight of the changeling that perched upon his back.

* * *

John skirted the dull canyons of New York, walked unseeing past tilted metal towers and glinting panes of glass that rattled in the high wind. Finally he came to a bus depot where he unfolded the tight bundle of Scott's money and purchased a ticket to the level fields of Kansas. Waiting at the booth John caught a phantom refracted across the corner of his eye. A glimmer of blue watching him, grinding out a cigarette beneath the sole of a blue boot. He turned away from the stranger's steady gaze, his atoms convulsing painfully as they tried desperately to spin themselves apart.

John had been the last to crawl from the fallen body of Three after his brothers had ruined her against the hard and unyielding Earth. He had staggered across a beach scarred black by burning rocket fuel, blinded by the blue sky, ozone peeling from the surf and filling his bruised lungs with daggers. Three lay sinking in the white surf behind him, a deep-sea creature lamenting as she settled uncomfortable on her side, a slow metal song of pain and betrayal that made him pause and turn to watch her die. Gordon and Alan faltered in the shade of the dying beast, their faces burned to white in the glare of the reflected sea, their uniforms dark with green salt water. They looked at John as if seeing only now his torn face, the scarlet smear of blood in his hair.

'John,' said Gordon, hands suspended bloodstained and lifeless in the salt-stained air.

'Don't,' said John, stepping back, nerves screaming with the annihilation of every grain of sand as it crushed to dust beneath his boots. Wordless, he turned and walked away. Away from the singing orange corpse on the wide yellow beach. Away from his brothers, moist-eyed and mute in the deep black shadow of her.

John walked for a long time on a road that smelled of honey, sweet tar softening in the hot sun, until he came at last to an outpost of civilisation, a mirage of life shimmering in the silver air before his eyes. An antiquated service station with an ancient public vidphone, where he dialled his father's private line, collect.

The heavy face that filled the screen was unfamiliar, the powerful body robed in high-collared silk the colour of night. The stranger focussed intently on John, dark eyes malignant beneath overshadowing brows, sensuous lips curving in a slow and mocking smile. Across the miles of empty air John could feel the swelling force that propelled this man, could sense the dark intent, palpable as though a hand had reached from the screen and stroked smoky fingers across his brow. John wiped sweating palms on his bloodstained shirt, his voice rasping thickly from a suddenly constricted throat. 'Who are you?'

The heavy brows rose in grave fascination as the smile faded from the lips, the voice rumbling from somewhere deep inside a cavernous chest. 'It is John Tracy I'm addressing, is it?'

The tone was formal and clipped, the vowels precise and round as though the English had been learned at the hands of a British schoolmarm. John was reminded of Kyrano, of the stories Kyrano had told about his youth, about the nuns in the missionary school who insisted English could be learnt to the beat of a hard stick to the knuckles.

'Yes,' John replied. 'And I repeat: who are you?'

'I,' said the man as he leant towards the screen, black eyes locked firmly on John's, white teeth gleaming in the crimson depths of his mouth, 'am the new king of Tracy Island.'

The smoky fingers fluttered again at John's temples, rippled cool and dangerous through the pale tangle of his hair. He recoiled from the smiling face that loomed before him but the invisible hand followed, lashing out and driving a barb of paralysing venom deep into his mind. John stiffened, impaled, caught like a fly in a web with the hungry beast circling around and around, cocooning him in filaments of steel. The walls of the booth tilted crazily, the lush mouth of the stranger whispering soundless beneath the spiralling vortices of his eyes. John's breath hitched feebly in his lungs and he trembled violently, blood pounding in his ears, veins pulsing to the rhythm of the ceaseless lips. Something winged and black rampaged through the high vault of John's skull, thundered through his thoughts and his memories, carelessly overturned the sacred and the mundane and pitilessly emptied his mind. John became a void, a soundless well of nothing, his spirit sundered utterly and broken. Sightless he hung before the screen, hands fluttering feebly at his sides, throat corded and tight as he struggled to break himself free.

Behind the darkening water of John's eyes something moved, a presence that stretched out contentedly, settled itself comfortably across the ransacked chaos of his mind. A stillness passed through him, a blackness in which he crouched wounded and afraid as the beast that breathed inside him unfolded like a black flower, disgorged a violent torrent of overwhelming sensation. Lightning bursts of pleasures and pains, images of foreign shores, things seen and things done and always everything tainted. Everything stained with blood. John's mind spilled over with it, a red and unforgiving tide that flooded every corner of him and threw him, gasping, onto a vast desert plain. A face that was burned and bruised and dying rose from the scorching sand, shimmered tear-stained and helpless before John's sightless eyes, filling him with heartbreak and dread and an understanding that had come far too late.

It was this moment that Brains had tried to impress upon them in the awkward days after Anasta, in the sweat-filled nights he would wake screaming in the dark. John knew that he, too, was screaming in the dark. Knew that no matter how far he ran he could never escape the taint that had just overflowed his soul.

* * *

The months John spent on the dry yellow fields of his childhood had been cathartic. He'd been reborn out of the cold heart of Five, a pale embryo fully-formed and conscious, but it had taken the soft and nurturing hands of his grandmother to bring him through his childhood of dissolution. She had taken him in her arms, fed him the clean fruits of the Earth, cut his hair on the porch and swaddled him in his father's old clothing. She would say how the sun fairly shone from him, and John would dazzle her with a smile so that she blinked in the glare and said Lord, how you do look like your Grandpa. The long slow summer leached the poison that stained John's soul, leaving him sun-bleached and clean, a bright silhouette against the blinding blue sky.

And then Virgil had come with his Botticelli curls, a melancholy ghost from the past standing awkwardly on the doorstep, and ruined it all.

Virgil had brought Time with him, bequeathed to John the cold knowledge that it was still ticking away, unchecked and uncontrolled. It had sucked the life out of Virgil, eaten the meat from his bones, was still feeding at the pulse in his throat.

And then one morning, after the weeks in the sun with his grandmother, safe and warm and surrounded by light, Scott came again to John. He formed out of darkness, mist coalescing into heartbreaking familiarity, dark hair curling alive on his head. John had been in this strange airless void before, a secret space inside him that threw out the living and the dead at random.

'John,' Scott said, blue eyes earnest and urgent. 'John.'

The phantasm floated in the void, exhaled a warm summer breeze over John's face. 'You have to be ready.'

John's eyes opened to the bright morning, the billowing white curtain, the blue sky beyond the window pane. He was ready.


	3. three

3.

Gordon was never sure if the cowardice had come from within, or if it was another gift that Gaat had bequeathed to him. It was something new, and hateful, something that appeared fully-formed within his battered psyche. It crouched in the dark recesses of Gordon's mind, an unshakeable companion whispering that it was here to stay. That no matter how deep he tried to bury it within him, it was never going away.

He was grateful that there were no witnesses to it, his dissolution. Alan had parted ways with him in Brisbane, stepped onto a plane and headed to Vegas where his old partner Kenny had found a car, a crew, and a cashed-up sponsor. Their parting had been awkward. A hesitant clasping of hands, an embarrassed smile. Bound together by their mutual shame the brothers had grown further and further apart. And when they could no longer face each other, when every quirk of expression reminded them of who they had left behind in bondage, their connection had helplessly dissolved. Like so much sand, sliding through their paralysed fingers.

Gordon had gravitated towards the sea, the salt-water core of him magnetised by an unheard song. He found work aboard a luxury yacht, the _Lenoble_, hired by Monsieur Lenoble's too-young wife as they prepared to ply a slow path north along Australia's eastern coast. From the expensive wooden deck Gordon watched the coastline slide by, studied navigation charts, memorised new and unfamiliar place names. They berthed for a week at Mooloolaba, the name slipping like oil across his unpractised tongue. They looked through binoculars at the humpback mound of Coolum, spent a day moored off Tin Can Bay, swimming in the warm blue water. And when they passed into the Coral Sea and the air became sticky and wet, the cook took out his clippers and cut Gordon's hair with a number four blade. The slow journey into summer finally halted in the tropical north, where every palm-fringed island reminded Gordon painfully of home. So he eschewed the island visits and stayed on the yacht, polishing the fixtures as studiously as he polished his guilt.

On the return south, at the town of Seventeen Seventy, Gordon said good-bye to Monsieur Lenoble and the too-young wife and returned to the unyielding earth. It seemed somehow fitting that he should use this place for his landing, the same place Cook had used three hundred years before, to begin the exploration of the fractured landscape of his soul. Gaat had resurrected parts of Gordon that he had thought long hidden, had shown to Gordon aspects of his personality he had never suspected existed. Thanks to Gaat, Gordon had learnt that he was more than the sum of his parts, more than the breadth of his experiences. He had learnt that deep inside him lurked a dark and shameful beast that was both his Phobos and his Deimos, his unsuspected fear and his terror. And to that could be safely added cowardice and shame.

When cooperation from Jeff had failed to come as quickly as anticipated, Gaat had apologetically announced that he was now forced to demonstrate the price to be paid for stubbornness.

Unfortunately for Gordon, the demonstration had begun with him.

With a sly flicker Gaat's eyes had alighted on Gordon and his men had responded instantly, manhandling Gordon unprotesting onto the villa's wide balcony, still slick with rain from the passage of Ena. As he was hauled stumbling onto the deck, fear of what was about to come made him consider leaping the rail and risking the long drop to the concrete patio below. Instead, Gordon turned his back to the open sea and the possibility of escape and faced the wall of glass doors through which Gaat now exited gracefully, being sure to slide them carefully closed behind him. Gordon felt his bowels turn to water at the quirk that twisted Gaat's lips and his resolve faltered, suffocating on the humid air. Behind the face that leered before him Gordon could see his family, grim and helpless observers to what was about to come. Gordon swallowed, once, his throat suddenly very dry.

Gaat came forward a few short paces and paused in front of Gordon, calmly observing him. Gordon steeled himself, tightened his body against the assault that was surely only seconds away, and brought his eyes to meet his captor's.

No matter how many times Gordon thought about that moment afterwards he could never be sure exactly what had happened. He knew only that he had looked into those wide black eyes and that Gaat had smiled, benignly, beneficently, and he had felt a warm rush of calm as his fear melted away.

And then Gordon's vision failed.

The blackness of Gaat's eyes expanded, blooming outwards like hungry flowers that swallowed the sea, the sky, the entire universe. Gordon felt himself falling endlessly as silence funneled into his ears and blotted out the world around him. The rustle of the coconut palms, the pointless crash of the surf below, all faded entirely from his perception.

Darkness then, and Gordon stopped falling. Came to rest against something hard and cold. He became aware of movement and sound. Urgent voices. Hands on his body. The erratic blip of a heart monitor. Gordon felt panic rising.

This couldn't be happening._ Not again._

He felt the sensation of cool water trickling over bare flesh, smelled the iodine tang of disinfectant, gagged against a tugging sensation in his throat. He tried to scream, but his mouth was filled with something hard and tight and foreign, something that stole into his collapsing lungs and burned so bad that he wanted to cry and beg them to take it away, to take away the stain of rusted metal upon his tongue. His throat convulsed as his panic continued to rise, an electric discharge that filled his head with white rushing noise as he struggled futilely to open his eyes, to make his body work for him.

Then came the pain, blossoming from every part of him in hard red waves. The unseen hands were touching, probing, rearranging the broken pieces of him, each movement sending a spear of agony into his helplessly grasping mind. His lungs filled with a brutal thrust of air, plastic-tainted and warm so that it made him want to retch, each forced inhalation bringing another crash of pain as his lungs unwillingly expanded and contracted against his shattered ribs.

_Take it out of me_, he thought between each hard burst of the respirator. _Let me die, because I can't go through this. Not again._

Finally came the paralysis, both dreaded and longed for, a cool numbing that began with his toes and moved along his body in welcome increments, a small death sweeping its inexorable way forward. Gordon no longer felt the probing hands, the jagged tears in his flesh, the broken bones grinding themselves against each other. He was aware only of the hard rush of air into his lungs and the sensation of blood moving, somewhere, deep inside him.

Gordon lay quiet in an eternal dark, listened to the monotonous hiss of equipment, the beep of the life-support machine, footsteps, voices, very far away. He felt warm breath on his face and wondered if there was anybody he loved there, watching over the broken ruin of his body. From somewhere he heard his father's voice, plaintive and afraid. 'Open your eyes son,' Jeff said as he stroked Gordon's brow and wiped the gum from his eyes. But Gordon couldn't, he couldn't. He had been crystallised in the dull amber of Time.

At some point Gordon's eyes did open. The sky was overcast again, the ocean dark and unforgiving, and he was alone on the balcony. Gaat had discarded him, left him where he had fallen, all certainty blasted from him and his eyes wet with tears. He covered his face with his hands, tasted salt on his lips. Gordon had learnt his lesson.

* * *

Gordon's training landed him a job in a dive shop, forcing tourist flesh into wetsuits, demonstrating regulators, refilling oxygen cylinders. He rode out to the reef and tipped his customers into the tepid sea, descended with them into water that was one day the bright hue of polished turquoise, the next day the colour of uncut jade. He would look up at the splintered sky, the sun fracturing through the waves as he sank into the embracing depths, at ease as he could never be when standing on the hard earth with gravity pressing uncomfortably upon him. Gordon was safe in this deep salt womb, attuned to the rhythm of his heart and the sound of his own breathing in his ears. WASP had given Gordon this, and it had given him opportunities and experiences that his brothers had never completely understood. They knew only that what WASP had given Gordon it had taken violently away, destroying him so utterly that they could barely resurrect him. And Gordon, too, knew it was responsible for the great chasm inside him that Gaat had so assiduously mined, bringing forth handfuls of glistening scars as though they were the most precious jewels to be found on Earth.

In the days after the lesson, Gordon came to realise that Gaat had done something else to him while they were on the balcony. Something neither he nor his family understood until it was far too late.

Gaat had spent some time deciphering the command console behind Jeff's desk, had cut off all communications to and from the island, had severed Five's comms, all on his first day. John was exquisitely vulnerable, alone in that fragile island in space, and Gaat knew that torturing John was the same as torturing them all. In the face of Jeff's continuing defiance Gaat struck out, across the empty miles of space.

Gordon was thrust toward the desk where Gaat stood sweating, a sweet musky odour like over-ripe fruit. Gaat placed his hand upon the small of Gordon's back, pulled him close and said calmly, rationally, genially, 'Reduce all of Thunderbird Five's auxiliary systems to half. Gravity, heat and shielding.'

Gordon froze, caught between revulsion and horror, the great hand burning like fire through the thin cotton of his shirt. He blinked, once, and found himself on the other side of the desk with no recollection of movement, no recollection of action, the sick grey face of his father telling him he had done the unthinkable.

Gordon looked at Gaat, who smiled kindly at him, and felt the blood drain from his body. A wave of nausea crashed over him and he staggered beneath it.

* * *

His days were filled with sunshine and smiles and clear blue water, but at night Gordon's struggle was endless. An inner paralysis, as devastating as his physical paralysis ever was, sapped his strength, weakened his resolve, reduced him to a core of nothing. A pair of unblinking eyes and a face made of stone. And when he slept, unwilling and uneasy, sly tendrils would penetrate his mind. A familiar searching and probing, the removal of boundaries, the demolition of barriers. Gaat submerged Gordon in a gentle pool of pain, the deconstruction so calm and so soothing and so hatefully intimate that Gordon gladly shut himself down, allowed himself to be buried beneath the hard layers of Gaat's probing mind.

Some nights Alan would call, from the tail-end of a win, a lengthy celebration of pale champagne and frothy blondes and sticky sweet avoidance. Gordon would listen as Alan talked his endless streams of balance and drag and fuel ratios, and how one day, sooner than anybody thought, he was going to get that son of a bitch. Gordon was a stone in the sea in the face of Alan's anger, the unstoppable tide of his brother's rage washing over him and leaving him unmoved and unthinking, a pleasant but dead place that consisted only of Gordon. And Gaat, inching his way through the crumbling fortress of Gordon's skull.

'I saw Virgil,' said Alan one night, unexpectedly. Tactlessly. 'He looked like shit.'

The last time Gordon saw Virgil was the day Gaat had taken him away. Gordon remembered with terrible clarity the dark bruises beneath his brother's eyes, the dried blood on his mouth, and his shirt. The way he had been herded across the blistering tarmac, eyes downcast, too defeated to meet anybody's gaze.

'I dunno,' Alan's voice filled the silent room, 'but I think he's drinking. God knows what he does for money.'

Gordon's face creased in the darkness. 'What did he say?'

'He said he's seen Dad.'

Gordon's fingers curled rigidly upon themselves, fingernails slicing painfully into the sweat-slicked cups of his palms. He was having trouble breathing. Thinking. 'How…?'

'He goes there. Gordon, he _goes_ there.'

* * *

There was a time when Gordon had been a fighter.

He'd been an athlete, a single-minded machine carved of muscle and tight sinew, imbued with more drive and determination than even the Tracy DNA could have compressed into his veins. His time at WASP had tightened him further, wound him like a steel spring and prepared him for combat and the leaden pressure of the undersea. Once upon a time Gordon had been unyielding, an unsuspected warrior concealed beneath a carefree smile and the peachfuzz canvas of his skin.

But one wet humid day, with a cyclone raging overhead and Gaat rummaging unimpeded through his brain, it had all fallen away. A great booming now filled Gordon's head, a mesmerising drumbeat that perfectly matched the weakening pulse of his heart and drained the blood from his limbs, leaving him empty and hollow and numb. A blameless vessel, waiting to move in whichever direction Gaat's basso voice wished to propel him. The midnight flowers of Gaat's eyes had been etched on the inside of Gordon's eyelids, blooming ever outwards and enfolding him, sweating and trembling, within their velvet petals, leaving only moments of disjointed time, the iris of Gordon's inner eye opening and closing and letting through snatches of bright memory that eluded his recall, like a dream that couldn't be remembered. Or a nightmare that couldn't be awoken from.

'Gordon,' Gaat had said one bright blue day, moving to take a seat behind Jeff's desk, enjoying the game, enjoying the growing pallor of Gordon's diminishing flesh. 'I am concerned about your brother John, all alone on Thunderbird Five with his oxygen soon to be running out. I would like you and the youngest to bring him home.'

Gaat paused then, and it seemed to Gordon that a light burned inside the man, a great fire that spit and licked and bled from his impenetrable black eyes. Caught in the glare of Gaat's incandescent hatred, the iris of Gordon's mind closed abruptly, then opened onto nightmare.

He remembered a moment of blind terror as Three lifted off, the eight-G of thrust tearing the flesh from his bones, squeezing the breath from his guttering lungs. He heard the dull thump of the rocket butting against the satellite, the whistling scream of air as it bled from the airlock. He remembered the blue vision of Earth as he passed through Five's dead console room, the suffocating odour of cold stale air, John's frozen hands burning into his own. A moment of pain, and blood, and the sound of somebody else breathing. And when the veil at last lifted from Gordon's eyes he was standing on yellow sand with a crust of blood upon his hands, watching the straight back of John as he walked away, the platinum of his brother's hair brilliant in the noonday sun.

* * *

'I want you to go home, to Grandma's. John's there' Scott's voice sounded very small and very far away, and somehow so very normal. Gordon suddenly envied his eldest brother, that Scott had never endured Gaat's unique violation. The deep and languid penetration as Gaat screwed his victims from the inside out.

'Did John tell you what happened?' Gordon could still see John's blood on his hands, staining the creases of his fingers, crystallising into rubies that blackened beneath his broken nails. He'd washed the blood away in the surf. Torn off his spattered tunic and watched it float away to sea.

'It doesn't matter Gordon. None of it matters. Father needs us.'

An image detached itself from the darkness behind Gordon's eyes. An image of their father, defeated, and… 'Scott, I can't.'

'Gordon, Dad needs you. _I _need you. Tell me what I can do – '

'There's nothing you can do. It's me, okay. It's me. It's… inside me.'

'_What_ is inside you?'

Bile rose in Gordon's throat, choked him with its acrid tang, burned his vocal chords into silence.

'For Christ's sake Gordon, I can't help you if you won't tell me anything.'

"It's… there's…' Gordon's hands rose uselessly before his eyes, as if he could somehow take hold of his terror and strangle it, hold it down and smother it until it was dead. He was glad the vid was voice only, so Scott didn't have to see that his brother had at last lost his mind. 'There's something inside me. And it makes me...'

'It makes you what?'

Gordon had always told his family that he remembered nothing of his accident. Looked them all straight in the eyes and lied.

He remembered the pilot realising they were out of control, the sudden absence of sound as their eyes met in a moment of quiet and helpless acceptance. He remembered the hydrofoil splitting apart, the sea rushing to fill the breach, a grey wall of water that silently tore the cabin to pieces. He remembered being slammed against bulkheads and broken paneling, being swept violently through a jagged field of debris and sent spinning across the Atlantic. He remembered the moment of submersion, the invisible hands that pulled him down and tumbled him over and over, weightless, through green salt water. He remembered cold fingers that twined into his own, rippled through the sun-faded forest of his hair and pressed soft against the gentle curve of his mouth. He remembered the ocean filling his lungs and how he welcomed it, breathed deeply of it, knowing it would take away the pain that sparked along his spine and came to rest like a flame upon the shattered base of his skull. He remembered swallowing gratefully the cool oblivion of the undersea as he sank motionless, into peace.

'Gordon?' Scott's voice came to him through layers of murky green, soft and tremulous. 'I can't do this alone.'

These things Gordon remembered and had tried to forget, but Gaat had released them from their moorings so they floated forever and always in the amber pools of his eyes. Cast adrift amongst his memories Gordon surveyed the painful wreckage of his life and felt the cold hands move once more to claim him. Realised they had never let him go. He was drowning. Constantly breathing green salt water.

* * *

That night Gordon dreamed of Scott.

He and Scott were in a desert, on their knees in the scorching sand with the sun burning their backs, blistering the skin on their necks, the sweat running into lakes beneath their armpits. Brains was buried to his neck, his scalded face weeping silently as the brothers dug, frantically plunging their bare hands into the sand, knuckles scraped and bleeding, fingernails tearing to shreds with each excavation. They couldn't stop digging, couldn't pause for a single second because the sand kept sliding back into the hole, the endlessly filling hole.

And then Brains was gone and it was Scott who lay in the sand, bruises beneath his quiet blue eyes and his lips blistered and bleeding. Gordon was filling the hole again, fingers sliding through the burning sand as he tamped it carefully around his brother's limp body. He worked methodically, scooping the fat mounds with another man's broad hands, with another man's sweat clinging to his back, another man's feral smile plastered to his lips. Gordon watched those hands as they moved rhythmically through the sand. Great dark hands they were, somebody else's hands. And somebody else's thoughts that flew on black wings through his mind.

Gordon woke to the humid night, sheets wet and twisted around his body, the dream bleeding like ice water through the pores of his skin. It collected in the creases of his elbows, gathered slick upon the delicate skin of his throat, trickled slowly across the suture-scarred hollow of his back.

* * *

During the long weeks of darkness with his body stretched unfeeling on starched white cotton, his lungs moving in mechanical rhythm, his life dependent upon a blue spark of electricity, Gordon dreamed many things. Planets wheeled in the darkness, and suns rose and set in the black spaces behind his eyes. He drifted across worlds and worlds, places of bright sunshine and lapping waves, places of blue ice and billowing silver winds. He watched a crystal city burn on a red desert plain, the hot air scorching his face and searing his wearied lungs. He sank into a cool and silent void where green-tinged women pressed their lips against his dead mouth, draped their seaweed hair across the unbroken skin of his chest. He longed to return their caresses, to press his tongue into their mouths and drink again of the ocean, to take the sea back into his broken body.

Sometimes voices called across the void, filtered by the deep water inside his head and full of such misery that he felt his heart might break. Gordon drifted on a somnolent tide, away from the misery, away from the pain that pulsed through his body like mercury and filled him to brimming. He spun weightless and called into the endless dark, 'Why?'

In the months after awakening Gordon would remember those glimpses of other worlds, and wonder if greater forces were at work. If it were the cold grey hand of Triton that had risen to break him and take his world away. But during those moments when he struggled to lift even a finger, when pain made sweat spring from his brow and tears fall uncontrolled from his eyes, he would watch the shadow of desolation as it passed across his father's face and wonder who it was that the gods had broken, after all.

Then had come another kind of breaking. A dark jungle god had risen from the fetid undergrowth and tangled vines of Malaysia, born from a rich black soil of anger and hate. A vengeful god, who could creep into your mind while your eyes were wide open, who could slide inside your body and move you to his own impulses. A god who could take you back to the worst moments of your life, and leave you there.

Some days, when storm clouds gathered on the horizon and the wind moved through the fine hairs on his arms and legs and dried the salt that clung to his lashes, Gordon would stand on the dive-boat and turn his eyes to the east, to where the island lay, below the horizon. He could hear Gaat's mind calling to him, a dark siren song from across the sea, luring him home.

Watching his customers disappear beneath the waves Gordon would wonder if maybe they could see what Gaat was doing to him. If they saw the shadows that moved behind his eyes, noticed the slackening of his mouth. If they caught the scent of the shame and humiliation that wound like a strangling vine through his soul.


End file.
